Part 2: Prof. Hartmut Wickert
Hartmut:
I’m doing it by myself. But I take the same seat?
Woo:
You can choose another one, it’s ok. No, it’s very nice, so I can…lean on it. I’m not so exposed, and it’s very nice for you to sit next to me.
Hartmut:
Hello everybody. I’m also very pleased to be here. I thank Danny very much for inviting me, and I feel it’s a big privilege to come here from Europe to share some thoughts with you. I already learnt a lot about different approaches to different fields, and now I’d like to tell you a bit about my topics and my experiences, which probably led me here. I used to be a theatre director, I’ll make it very shortly.
Theatre director, it’s not very common to make a decision to stop your artistic career and start an institutional career. And 10 years ago, I made this decision, and it was like, as you probably know, in the German speaking part of Europe, we have a lot of institutionalized theatres, and they tend to become more and more kind of public services. It means repertory, 6 weeks’ rehearsals, first performance, 20 performances, about 20 to 30 new plays a year. It’s a machinery which delivers artistic work to an audience. The room for experimentation is quite limited I think, because we are founded by the state in a very good way, but it also means we have to prove our work by the number of audience all the time. And that’s a kind of problem. So when I started to work with actresses and actors while I was directing, I thought it could be a good idea to take the chance to start a second career in the educational system, not as a teacher, but to format new approaches to artistic work.
I also have to say that the theatre education in Europe is one of the most strict education on the level of higher education. It’s very curriculum-based, and the students don’t have much freedom to develop their own ideas, and it’s very much like in school. It’s very different, for example, for the programmes in fine arts, where the students have their studios and they work on their own work.
So, what I really wanted to do, and we are on our way to prove that it’s possible to loosen all these curricular given paths, which have to be followed, because we still think we are producing objects for a market.
And that is something which is very bad, and we try to stop that. These are some confusing remarks concerning my approach to institutional work. But now I have to tell you something about this university I’m also forming. This is a very special university.
In Switzerland, we only have 4 art universities, 2 in the French speaking part of Switzerland and 2 in the German speaking part of Switzerland, and the Zurich University of the Arts is the biggest one. We have 2200 students, and we offer programmes in all fields of artistic work-music, fine arts, design, art education, film, dance, theatre, and…what did I forget, something else? But most of the art forms are offered at this university. The university has existed since 2006, and the idea of founding this university is a merge of 2 former institutions. It is one of the first crosses I want to talk about, it’s trans and cross-disciplinary work. We are really convinced that it’s possible, and that it’s necessary in the society in which we are living, which is mainly based on networking.
It’s a crucial obligation for us as responsible persons for educational stuff to open the disciplinary paths and to let the art disciplines have contacts to each other, open to each other and offering potentials for inventing new forms of artistic works, which is taking place in the professional field everyday, but the schools are still very much orientated in disciplines. So we are loosening the disciplinary paths, and try to construct fields where cross-disciplinary works are not only possible, but also an obligation. So in the strategy we are following, the first thing or the first element which is crucial for arts is mobility, mobility of teaching and learning. That means developing and inventing fields where students from all disciplines come together and learn together. We can talk about this later. I don’t want to go too much into details, but we really invented formats where this takes place. The students have to study with students from other disciplines to a certain amount of their credits they have to get.
And this is improving more and more, and the teachers and the students are becoming more and more interested in these common fields, where also interesting, experimental works of art are taking place. The second cross I will talk about is the research programme we enforce in our strategy, which is also a new field. We call it “Artistic Research”, and it’s now recognized and acknowledged by the government, and it’s funded very well, and it is a means to develop the learning programme. I’d like to talk about learning programmes and teaching programmes. In terms of exploring and developing new fields, which are unknown yet and have to be known in future time, so there are a lot of research projects in the fields of, theatre for example, which deal with new forms of theatrical practice, reenactment as one theme. I don’t know if you have heard of that. It’s a very popular form of theatre work in Europe in the moment, or work with non-professional actors is also a main topic in German theatre. That means having experts on stage who are acting out their expertise, xxx…
Woo:
Do you mean you’ll get a doctor to play a doctor on stage?
Hartmut:
No, it’s not right. We’re not allowed to have PhD programmes yet, we have to do that with universities. No, I don’t mean PhD, I mean…Doctor, right, it’s a doctor who plays a doctor. On stage? Yeah, on stage, right, or other persons. A lawyer plays a lawyer? Right, that’s right. But he doesn’t play, he is himself, and he is put into an environment which is a kind of directed or in a certain way channeled, that’s what I want to say.
Hartmut:
I have to talk about the third cross, which is the most important cross. That’s the cross-cultural, momentarily, our strategy is internationalization strategy. And we are convinced that there is one simple answer to the question Danny has raised. Cross-cultural learning and learning environments are crucial means to develop future programmes in education. I’m very convinced, as I’m responsible for the international programmes we are running, and I can tell you that the effects on the students and on the teaching staff are enormous. The effect being confronted with teachers from other countries, from other cultures, working together, building collaborative teams.
Like it’s happening in HK, we built a branch here. It’s called “Connecting Spaces”.
Some of you would know that it’s situated in North Point, but it’s only a symbolic place. Connecting spaces means much more, we have lots of partnerships with HK universities. In the mean time, we are running one master semester programme. It’s called “Transcultural Collaboration”, where teachers from different universities from Zurich, Hangzhou in Mainland China, Taipei and three from HK universities are working together to build a curriculum. It is in progress now, and it’s become more and more concrete. And it’s a curriculum for students from different disciplines again. It’s not a curriculum focused on theatre students, there are also film students, music students and students from different fields. They are actually dealing with the question: “What environments are necessary to make creativity happen?” Oh, that’s not a very good expression. But I mean you can’t enforce creativity but you can build surrounding environments where creativity is possible. There’s one main issue of these programmes- to form certain environments where students meet each other, confront with each other and learn from each other, comparing and confronting their different cultures.
The second programme is called “Building Bridges”. It’s a collaboration of 5 universities, 2 from New York City, 2 from Scandinavia, and Zurich. There is also something we try to do, which is developing or inventing a new curriculum. It takes place one year, 10 days in each of the participating cities. 10 days in New York City, 10 days in Helsinki or Stockholm, and 10 days in Zurich. And the students from different fields start to develop by just delivering some topics concerning their heritage, and their artistic approach to their discipline to found the bases for working together. The interesting thing is that they are only 10 days together, and then they are at their own universities for 3 months, but they go on working because they are gonna meet again in another city. The work is prolonged, about long-termed and long distances, so they learn to keep contacts, to nourish their networks and to follow their projects which they conclude in their final meetings.
And the third thing I’d like to talk about is- we call HK the first partnership hub of our university, and we build the second hub in terms of internationalization, which is called “Arts for Change”. This is very different, as we are not choosing one region, but we place this programme all over the world. How can I say…
In unequal partnerships situation, like my department is building other partnerships with different institutions and arts spaces in Quagadougou of Burkina Faso. And unequal means, they have very different approaches to the same disciplines we are offering, but the approaches are very much connected to the political and social situations of these countries, which is from its self-understanding not so far from European context. It has been a colony also, they are speaking French, and it’s easy to communicate, but the means and approach to artistic work are so much socially based, and so political that we are really forced to question ourselves if we do enough for the grounding, the bases of our artistic works, and our artistic approaches. This is only one example.
Other departments have partnerships with India. The music department, for example, they are building a music learning programme with an Indian university.
The design department is also very much engaged in Africa. The topic social design, which was mentioned yesterday, has very important impact for design education. So we try not only to travel but to bring all the experiences concerning these international partnerships back to Zurich, and deal with the fact.
There is also a main thing I have to say, internationalization at home. Switzerland has 30% of its population foreigners, so it’s 9 million people living in Switzerland only, and 1/3 is foreigners. It’s not only foreigners from Germany, America, Spain or Portugal, but also from Yugoslavia, many people from former Yugoslavia, and from the Eastern state of Europe. So it’s a mixed society, nobody wants to realize it, but we see it in the schools. My wife is a primary teacher, and she has a class where only 1/3 is speaking German, all the others are unable to speak German.
They have these programmes which enable the young people to learn German, and become part of the learning system of our society.
Internationalization at home is a very strong and important topic that we are following, and also bringing these experiences of partnerships abroad back to home, back to our curriculum, and enable us to get the spirit of a learning organization of change and management, and always trying to change what we thought was right yesterday.
So, that’s the end.
Thank you.
Woo:
You want to stay here? You can stay. Let’s invite the next speaker, Miss Ada Wong.